OpenBSD 6.3 Released Early and Available for Download Now

OpenBSD 6.3 Released Early and Available for Download Now

Ahead of schedule, OpenBSD 6.3 is now available for download. Originally planned to be released on April 15th, the OpenBSD team released it early as “all the components are ready”.

OpenBSD 6.3 can be downloaded from a variety of mirrors listed on the OpenBSD.org web site. According to the announcement, this version includes the following changes:

Improved hardware support including SMP support on ARM64 platforms.

vmm(4)/ vmd(8) improvements including CD/DVD support.

IEEE 802.11 wireless stack improvements

Generic network stack improvements

Installer improvements

Routing daemons and other userland network improvements

Security improvements

dhclient(8) improvements

OpenSMTPD 6.0.4

OpenSSH 7.7

LibreSSL 2.7.2

A full changelog for OpenBSD 6.3 can be found here.

For those not familiar with OpenBSD, it is a free open-source Unix-like operating system that has been around since 1996. This platform is known for being a very secure and efficient platform with highly documented code, highly audited code, and for only using open-source libraries and drivers.

It is also well known for use the latest security technologies, so can be a great platform for creating firewalls. With that said, OpenBSD is not known for holding a user’s hand, so if you want to try it out and are unfamiliar with Linux or Unix, you should expect a learning curve.

I learned how to use Unix using a BSD platform in college and it was a great way to learn how to use a Unix-like type of operating system. Give it a try and you may find it’s a similar experience.